Agnibha Banerjee
The Open University, UK



About Me

I am a PhD Student at (The Open University), UK. I am working with Dr Jo Barstow on exploring the atmospheres of Venus-like exoplanets with JWST.

I joined IISER Kolkata as a BS MS student after high school. Here, I gained a foundation in the basic sciences from the interdisciplinary nature of studies in my first few years and later chose physics as a major. In the summer after my second year, I attended an Introductory Summer School in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune and learned about the various fields of research in astrophysics. That year, I also worked with Dr. Bhargav Vaidya at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore on radiative transfer simulations for AGNs.

In the summer after my third year, I received the MITACS Globalink Research Internship funding to work with Dr. Nicolas Cowan at the McGill Space Institute, Montreal. During this project, I adapted analytical models for incident light maps used in binary star systems for application to exoplanets. I also attended the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) Annual Meeting in 2019 and learned about current research in exoplanets. For my master's thesis, I worked with Dr Dibyendu Nandi at IISER Kolkata to review current techniques of atmospheric characterisation of exoplanets.

Other than astronomy, I love swimming and enjoy reading sci-fi and fantasy fiction.